ABOUT

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

ARCHIVE

LAGNIAPPE

MAST

SUBMISSIONS

It was January, 1979 and America lay in the midst of The Great Malaise.

Double-digit inflation ravaged the economy, oil prices and interest rates soared, and all the while, 52 Americans languished in a burned-out Tehran office suite, awaiting what they were certain was immanent death. Some blamed Jimmy Carter for the national crises; others the war in Southeast Asia, which for two decades, had drained the nation's coffers and its collective spirit.

Regardless of precisely where the fault resided, it was a bleak time for Americans.

But from this murky, stagnant pit of recession and self-loathing, a man would soon emerge from California, offering us hope, inspiration and a poignant reminder of what that American can-do spirit is able to accomplish once galvanized. An actor, and a visionary and a leader, our Savior from the West gave us a shot in the arm that, even today, few of us can forget. Above the din of despair, he gave us a reason to cheer.

That beacon of hope's name was Andy Griffith. And that shot in the arm came in the form of a rocket ship called the Vulture, a Franken-machine culled from equal parts junk-yard scrap and something like the dreams of eagles. His inspiring message was delivered each week, in a neat 60-minute bundle called Salvage 1.

Andy played a man named Harry, and Harry's mission was simple: Piece together a lunar lander made from an old cement mixer, a Texaco oil truck, a few surplus rocket engines and some tires, and fly that sucker straight to the moon. Goddamn, it was beautiful plan.

And as mid-season replacements go, it was a rare jewel. A rare and precious jewel.

See, it's like this. For those of you have forgotten, there was time in our collective television history when we weren't fascinated by the ruminations of eight strangers picked to live together in a house, or the baffling inability of would-be millionaires to adequately explain to Regis the number of sides in an octagon. (Note to Vince from Ohio: It's eight, Vince.)

Yes, once upon time, our imaginations were captivated by a man named Harry with a salvage yard in Southern California who convincingly told us of his scheme to fly to the stars.

The vehicle by which this heroic account of human determination found its way into American homes was Salvage 1, which aired on ABC, the home of contemporaries Fantasy Island and Three's Company, and arguably was the boldest TV network of the late 1970s, during most of 1979.

In the 17 weeks before it was ultimately killed off by fickle network exec types, Salvage 1 did what all good TV should do: help people feel a little better about things. If Andy Griffith could build a rocket and fly to the moon with some crap he found lying around his back yard, then suddenly that 18% mortgage interest rate didn't seem so bad.

Sure Salvage 1 was dumb. It was really dumb. It was a WWF-Montel-Nastruck-Moral Court brand of stupid that's usually reserved for guys in Mississippi whose final words are often, "Hey Cooter, watch this."

It wantonly ignored the basic rules of physics. It was poorly acted. And it was juvenile. It was the kind of science fiction programming that probably contributed to Stephen Hawking's ALS.

	The way were were: Salvage 1 cast in a joyous mood, post-landing. All screen captures by George Leonberger.

But once the reasonable suspension of disbelief kicked it, and viewers surrendered themselves to fact that Sheriff Taylor planned to use a cement mixer and some rockets he found to fly to the moon, well, goddamn, you had little choice but to go along for the ride.

"Although Salvage 1 was sometimes embarrassingly bad, there were almost always some wonderful character moments," writes George Leonberger, who maintains an exhaustive Web site devoted to preserving the memory of Salvage 1. "I enjoyed the imaginative fun of the show; evident in the whimsical theme music, the thrown-together design of the spaceship Vulture and the portrayal of Harry Broderick by Andy Griffith, who is one of my sentimental favorite actors."


The real Harry Broderick
Salvage 1 was the brainchild of a man named Mike Lloyd Ross. Ross, a former Navy electronics technician, read an account of the crude technology that served as the basis for the Apollo missions, and thought the idea of building a spacecraft from stuff in a junkyard might make for a compelling big-screen drama.

But producers Harve Bennett (who went on to produce four very successful Star Trek movies) and Harris Katleman recognized that although it was an interesting concept, Ross' pitch was clearly high and outside. The idea for the show, they thought, was certainly better-suited to the small screen.

(Nearly 20 years later, amidst the reality-based programming craze that grips the Western world, BBC producers unleashed Junkyard Wars, the premise of which is remarkably similar to the creative impetus behind Salvage 1. In the least, Bennett and Katleman and Ross were slightly ahead of their time.)

Salvage 1 debuted as a two-hour made-for-TV movie called Salvage on Saturday, January 20, 1979. Almost instantly, ABC picked it up as a series, and moved it to Monday nights.

"The pilot film is an absolute delight," writes Leonberger. "'Salvage' is undoubtedly the best of all the episodes."

In Salvage viewers meet Harry Broderick, played by Griffith, owner of the Jettison Salvage and Scrap Company. Yearning to conquer the elusive final frontier of scrap metal procurement that had alluded the likes of all TV junkmen before him—Fred G. Sanford included—Broderick conceives a brilliant plan. If not for Griffith's unflinching earnestness, the scheme might be construed as an avarice-fueled madman's pursuit. Broderick wants to fly to the moon to salvage the valuable parts left over from NASA's Apollo landings, essentially desecrating an international landmark.

We'll just cut to chase and let you know that the Vulture's astronaut's make it to the moon at the end of that first episode, touching down on Tranquility Base, just a few feet from where the Eagle had landed 10 years earlier. Upon setting foot on the lunar surface, the Vulture's commander places on the pole of the American flag the flag of the Vulture, containing the logo of Jettison Scrap. A half-Earth hangs in the sky above. It's a beautiful television moment.

Cast and Crew
Flying to the moon in a home-built spaceship isn't an undertaking to be approached lightly. The writers understood this, and devised a crew that could plausibly get the job done. Griffith's Broderick recruited fuel expert Melanie "Mel" Slozar, PhD, played by Trish Stewart, an actor Starlog magazine described in a 1980 interview as the woman with monohydrazine in her veins. Starlog said Slozar "is as capable of discussing the translinear vector principle as she is of preparing omelettes or applying makeup." Stewart, subsequently, fell into obscurity shortly thereafter. She hasn't acted since 1980. Monohydrazine-veined typecasting is a cruel mistress.

The other lead on Salvage 1 was Joel Higgins, who played former NASA astronaut Addison "Skip" Carmichael. In the event that name didn't give it away, Higgin's character was white.

There's a profound sexual tension that fritters back and forth between Carmichael and Slozar, former lovers-turned-junk-rocket colleagues. But there's wisdom in their relationship too. Deep space is no place for rump-grabbing shenanigans, and Carmichael and Slozar knew it.

In the event that a mental image didn't immediately materialize at the mention of Higgins, after Salvage 1, the actor went on to play Edward Stratton III (Ricky "Rick" Schroder's dad) on Silver Spoons. Coincidentally, his co-star was also a sci-fi refugee. Erin Gray appeared on Buck Rogers in the 25th Century before she too landed back on Earth.

Like Stewart, Higgins too is in something of a career drought. He hasn't appeared on film since about 1990.

Re-entry
On Friday, Dec. 21, 1979, poor ratings finally sent Salvage 1 hurtling toward the Earth in a fiery, orange ball. While Nielson numbers ultimately killed it, the program may have been fatally flawed from the get-go.

In an attempt to entertain and inspire when everything on the national landscape seemed so bad, Salvage 1 had little choice but to go for broke and wow its audience right out of the gate. In its debut episode, the Vulture landed its crew on the moon, raising the unanswerable question, where do you go from there?

Well, folks, you go down.

What the producers failed to learn from the real space program was that people kept watching because every episode in the quest got better. Salvage 1 was handicapped because it was working in the other direction: instead of building toward a goal, each week the series slipped deeper and deeper in the thick, gooey morass of pointless idiocy.

Subsequent plot lines, for example, involved the capture of spider monkeys, the debate over whether to part-out a 1932 Bugatti, and a brilliantly ill-conceived mission to the Arctic circle where the Vulture would lasso an iceberg, haul it back to L.A. so as to solve Southern California's drought problem.

Exactly why one needs a 100-foot rocket ship to accomplish any of these tasks was never made clear.

Still, for a few weeks, Salvage 1 gave us a reason to dream the impossible dream, and a reason to believe that some guy with an half-assed space ship can shoot for the stars, and get there, and even take us all with him. Yep, in the cold winter of 1979, Americans needed some escapism, and Salvage 1, for all it's flaws, delivered.

A few months after Salvage 1 was cancelled, another actor from California showed up on the national scene, with another plan to raise our hopes and to build something in space.

But somehow, I couldn't get as excited. It had already been done.